Not Human Resources, Humans!

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Not Human Resources, Humans!

Products, services, technology, and research data all belong on a corporate World Wide Web server. But what about personal Web pages of the people who create those products, services, technology, and research? Visit the corporations on the Web: you won't see any people. Not at IBM, not at Hewlett-Packard, not at Microsoft, Apple, or Sun. Not anywhere. It seems the bureaucratic, left-side-of-the-brain-only corporations have decided that, on the Internet, the only thing that matters is corporate image.

It's an extraordinary and sometimes frighteningly bizarre world here inside IBM (where I work), and I hear it's just as strange inside other large companies. At IBM, if you want to post something about yourself on the Web, you must designate your page as an employee page, not a personal page. (Apparently, it must be absolutely clear that a person and an employee are two different entities.) The blanket of bureaucracy still prevails - it seems the IBM brass don't want to tell the world that IBM employees are real people with opinions and ideas of their own.

I asked the IBM webgods (http://www.ibm.com/) where all the people were, and how I could make my personal, er, employee page browsable by external clients. The webgods were shocked. Startled into a frenzied anxiety culminating in a corporate coma, they recited that IBM, like its high-tech corporate cohorts, does not publish information about its employees, and that if I wanted to make my personal page available on the World WIde Web, I would have to "find some other way."

And I did - thanks not to IBM but to AT&T, where I was able to establish my personal page (http://www.research.att.com/~rhb/bechdol/) on its network.

Take a look at the companies on the Web (http://www.directory.net/) and see if there are any people. Demand to see them. Leave your trace there. Ask them: "Where are the people?" Sign it. And leave my name right next to yours.